President Donald Trump's failure to present a cogent response in the aftermath of Charlottesville had everything to do with his failure of understanding history, Bill O'Reilly wrote in a column for The Hill.
The president should have discerned the difference between a fight over Civil War-era statues vs. what really was represented that fateful day in Virginia — salutations to the evils of Nazism.
"Adolph Hitler has become a caricature of evil, a distant monster. He should be as vivid as today's sunrise," O'Reilly wrote. "The historical context of the Charlottesville reaction is that mass murder was carried out by ordinary Germans while the vast majority of that population looked away out of self-interest and fear.
"President Trump did not understand that and it has hurt him," the former host of "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox wrote.
Instead, Trump called out the "many sides" who contributed to violence that day amid protests over plans to pull down a Robert E. Lee statue. Though valid, "that point must wait to be made" after a woman was killed by a Nazi sympathizer, O'Reilly wrote.
"The proximity of white supremacists to the situation obscures the point, and makes Mr. Trump seem insensitive to the danger these loons pose, and to the horrors of slavery," O'Reilly wrote.
"If Donald Trump and millions of others had really studied the evil of the Third Reich, the Charlottesville political debacle might have been avoided in the sense that zero tolerance for the supremacists could have actually united the country," O'Reilly wrote.
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